The bitter relationship between teachers and this provincial government could be a thing of the past, with a clean slate in store for future bargaining sessions.

That’s because the 15 years of tense and acrimonious relations have been wiped clean by the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision and the collaborative way the government and teachers agreed on implementation of the restored 2002 working conditions.

The looming provincial election may have been just the motivation both sides needed to make a quick, clean deal.

The B.C. Liberals may have been motivated by criticism from angry voters about delays over seismic upgrades and school boards that have had to make cuts to classrooms to balance their budgets. The B.C. Teachers’ Federation freely admits the timing couldn’t have been better as far as they’re concerned.

“It just so happened that we got our decision earlier than anybody expected, … and given the hot button issue that education has become, … then I have no doubt that shaped the approach the employer took in terms of being willing to agree to restore 99.9 per cent of the language the way it was,” said Glen Hansman, president of the BCTF. “If they were proposing something widely different, … you can bet we would have been yelling and screaming about it through an election.”

The BCTF had considered the possibility that the Supreme Court of Canada wouldn’t rule until spring of 2017, leaving them either left to negotiate with no government if the election writ had already been dropped or with a government right at the start of its mandate.

Education Minister Mike Bernier said that a few days before the final deal was made, he met with Hansman and they talked about the timing of the deal.

FILE PHOTO B.C. education minister Mike Bernier announces an infusion of $217-million to build up to 5,200 new student seats in the Surrey school district, at a press conference in Surrey, B.C. Thursday, January 26, 2017.Jason Payne /
PNG

“The very factual conversations of timing was important, because for him it was we’ve got spring break coming up, our teachers need to be looking at this, from my end it was we need to give some certainty to the school districts because they are going to start planning now for the next school year,” Bernier said.

The timing of the deal also allows school districts to have extra teachers in place for the start of the next school year. Because every school district has different rules now and has been operating under different rules for the past 15 years, it is difficult to pin down an exact cost of the deal, but Bernier estimates it will be in the $300-million range. He said there will be “time and flexibility” built into the costing.

Members of the negotiating teams for the teachers and the government agree the negotiations this time around where much more collaborative and solutions-oriented than they have been in at least 15 years.

Daily meetings lasted much longer than in past negotiations, both sides were quick to respond to each other’s proposals with counter offers, and there was a more civil tone at the bargaining table, say those who attended the daily negotiations. It was a far cry from how B.C. Supreme Court Justice Susan Griffin described past collective bargaining, such as how government officials sometimes didn’t even bother reading the BCTF’s proposals for days and both sides ignored each other’s data in making counter-offers.

Bernier said that he and Hansman were in touch throughout the entire negotiation and that it was “very civil, very casual.”

“There was work to do at the table but there was no animosity. It was just ‘OK so how do we move forward’,” Bernier said.

Hansman said there were disagreements, but that at no point did negotiations approach any sort of impasse.

“Our MO was that we were not there to bring forward any improvements … this was not about that, this was about restoring what was taken away and it became clear that they were willing to take a similar approach, with the one exception being the compliance and remedy section, which has a common provincial approach,” Hansman said. “That became a challenge and we probably would have had the whole thing wrapped up a month sooner had that not come to the fore.”

Class composition — the number of special needs children who can be in any one classroom — was and remains a bit of a sticking point. A committee has been formed to modernize the language and to make sure special needs students are educated in an inclusive way, going forward. If no agreement is reached by the committee by June 30, 2018, the matter will go to arbitration.

Provincial minimums are in place for class sizes for kindergarten through Grade Three and for the numbers of specialist teachers. But no such rules are in place for the numbers of special needs students in classrooms and 20 districts have no rules on that at all, while others do.

Both sides agreed to leave any “major changes” to the 2019 contract negotiations, Hansman said.

“I think it will be fair to assume that we will be wanting to fill in some of the holes for our locals that don’t have any (class composition) language, but also keeping an open mind about different ways of respecting teacher working conditions with respect to class composition, Hansman said.

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